The Real Conflict Is Not Racial Or Sexual

American Renewal: The Real Conflict Is Not Racial Or Sexual, It’s Between The Ascendant Rich Elites And The Rest Of Us

Grae Stafford-Daily Caller News Foundation

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JOEL KOTKINCONTRIBUTOR

September 11, 201910:54 AM ET

Despite the media’s obsession on gender, race and sexual orientation, the real and determining divide in America and other advanced countries lies in the growing conflict between the ascendant upper class and the vast, and increasingly embattled, middle and working classes.

We’ve seen this fight before. The current conflict fundamentally reprises the end of the French feudal era, where the Third Estate, made up of the commoners, challenged the hegemony of the First Estate and Second, made up of the church and aristocracy.

These dynamics are unsettling our politics to the core. Both the gentry left, funded largely by Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and the libertarian right, have been slow to recognize that they are, in de Tocqueville’s term, “sitting on a volcano ready to explode.” The middle class everywhere in the world, notes a recent OECD report, is under assault, and shrinking in most places while prospects for upward mobility for the working class also declines.

The anger of the Third Estate, both the growing property-less Serf class as well as the beleaguered Yeomanry, has produced the growth of populist, parties both right and left in Europe, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. In the U.S., this includes not simply the gradual, and sometimes jarring,  transformation of the GOP into a vehicle for populist rage, but also the rise on the Democratic side of politicians such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, each of whom have made class politics their signature issue. (RELATED: Bernie Sanders Says Middle Class Will Pay More In Taxes)

The Rise of Neo-Feudalism

Today’s neo-feudalism recalls the social order that existed before the democratic revolutions of the 17th and 18th Century, with our two ascendant estates filling the roles of the former dominant classes. The First Estate, once the province of the Catholic Church, has morphed into what Samuel Coleridge in the 1830s called “the Clerisy,” a group that extends beyond organized religion to the universities, media, cultural tastemakers and upper echelons of the bureaucracy. The role of the Second Estate is now being played by a rising Oligarchy, notably in tech but also Wall Street, that is consolidating control of most of the economy.

Together these two classes have waxed  while the Third Estate has declined. This essentially reversed the enormous gains made by the middle and even the working class over the past 50 years. The top 1% in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth in 1945-1973, but since then the country’s richest classes has gobbled up an astonishing 58.7% of all new wealth in the U.S., and 41.8 percent of total income growth during 2009-2015 alone.

In this period, the Oligarchy has benefited from the financialization of the economy and the refusal of the political class in both parties to maintain competitive markets. As a result, American industry has become increasingly concentrated. For example, the five largest banks now account for close to 50 percent of all banking assets, up from barely 30 percent just 20 years ago. (RELATED: The Biggest Bank You’ve Never Heard Of)

The Undeclared War on Middle Class Suburbia

The Undeclared War on Middle Class Suburbia

Posted by: Richard Hall - October 8, 2017 - 2:57pm







Glancing at today’s newspapers, a reader might easily believe the only important topics are our erstwhile president and “What’s he gone and done now?”. But for those of us leading busy lives that would be a grand mistake, because we’ve taken our eye off the ball. The big changes are not only happening in Washington D.C., but also in Sacramento - and soon, right here in our own neighborhoods.

The March of the YIMBYs

Over the last few years, a new movement has formed in San Francisco - a movement made up of 20 and 30 somethings who prefer the urban environment. This movement detests middle class suburbia for its “inefficient” use of land and transportation, and for what it deems to be implicit exclusion of races and those on lower incomes through zoning decisions that maintain high property values. And that would be fine, but they not only have Sacramento’s ear, they’ve lobbied heavily for significant change.

The movement was born out of the San Francisco chapter of the Bay Area Renters Federation or SF BARF. SF BARF renamed itself SF YIMBY - that’s “Yes in My Backyard”. Their goal sounds worthy. The Bay Area, especially Silicon Valley and San Francisco, has rapidly grown the number of jobs in the region, but this thirst for fresh troops for the technology sector has far outpaced the region’s housing supply. The result, we’re all too aware of sky high costs of living and traffic congestion.

The YIMBYs want to build as much housing as possible, to address the housing crisis and their number one enemy is the suburbs. They look to the many perceived obstacles that have inhibited housing development there. With a slew of legislation just passed in September 2017, they have bulldozed and dispensed with many of these obstacles, such as:
Architectural design review
Consideration of traffic impacts
Consideration of school impacts
Consideration of impacts on infrastructure
Community input
Local Council approval
Environmental review

I met with a YIMBY for coffee - a Silicon Valley engineer in his late 20s. He was smart, informed and engaged. His concern was that the high cost of housing was hindering people from getting on the house ownership ladder in the Bay Area. He himself had benefited from an IPO stock offering and had no problem affording a home, but he wanted to demonstrate his support for many other workers without that advantage.

YIMBYs have become a powerful force in the Bay Area region. They have become highly connected to the young tech elite raising large sums in support - $100,000 from Jeremy Stoppelman, the founder of Yelp, and more from Dustin Moskovitz, a founder of Facebook. They now hold an annual conference called “Yimbytown”. The SF YIMBY organization now has a full time, paid staff pushing their agenda.

The Triumvirate of State Senate Bills

Allied with San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener, YIMBYs were delighted when the California State Senate recently passed three housing bills:


Senate Bill 2 charges real estate documentation recording fees of $75 per document, with the funds to be used to pay for affordable housing development;

Senate Bill 3 proposes to raise $4 billion through the sale of state bonds to fund affordable housing development; and

Senate Bill 35 allows qualifying developments to bypass local and environmental review, and assume “by right” zoning for high density housing development, if those developments meet some simple qualifying criteria:
They include 2 or more units;
The developer pays “prevailing wage, which is code for union rates, if the project has 75 units or more;
At least 10% of the units qualify as “affordable” or whatever the prevailing minimum requirement is (in Marin this is typically 20%). The units that qualify as “affordable,” only includes a small number of very low income units;
The city or county must have failed to issue permits for enough new housing units to meet their requirements for each income category in the city’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment or RHNA quota.

Putting Development on the Fast Track

Typically, it takes 30 days or more for a city to identify omissions in development applications, and months and sometimes years to process and approve them. However, Senate Bill 35 puts review on the fast track, so not only review, but also approval must be given to qualifying proposals:

(1) Within 90 days, for developments with under 150 housing units.

(2) Within 180 days, for developments with more than 150 housing units.

Put another way, if a city does not grant approval within these timelines, they open themselves up to litigation, not just from the developer but from any interested third party (i.e., housing advocacy groups). Successful plaintiffs are also entitled to collect legal fees and costs.

Moving Away from Planning Commissions & Design Review Boards

Today, California’s cities and counties typically have a planning commission and a design review board. Together with their locally elected councils and supervisors they review applications and ensure architectural design conforms to local norms and codes.

Senate Bill 35 removes this local review process to ensure that developments will not be held up for long periods, while local boards apply subjective requirements. The new bill directs that only previously documented, objective requirements can be used. Few local jurisdictions in California have such documented standards in place - none in Marin do. To do so would be a sizable undertaking requiring diverting local planning teams and engaging in public outreach.

Senate Bill 35 will go into effect on January 1st 2018. Local jurisdictions now have less than 90 days to complete this process or developers will potentially be able to bypass architectural and design review, and many of the other impacts noted above.

The Irony - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose May Be Unaffected

Certainly, a major reason for the housing shortage in the SF Bay Area has been the increase in tech jobs primarily in major cities. However, San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose may all easily meet their required permitting quotas to build, while locations such as Marin will not, simply because land is so scarce, infrastructure is inadequate, water resources are very limited, building costs are high and few developments there prove to be financially feasible.

Who is paying for All This Altruism? The Middle Class, of Course

Politicians at local and state levels have become adept at presenting legislation with highly attractive (who could possibly oppose them) names, which conceal steep increases in taxes and fees, the burdens of which fall mainly on the middle class.

For instance, who could possibly oppose SB2, “The Building Homes and Jobs Act,” an innocuous sounding $75 “documentation fee” increase. Opponents sent a letter to State legislators putting their own spin on it, but here are the fee increases without any spin:
Recording documents after the loss of a spouse: (Increase from $36 to $261)
Contractors, laborers, suppliers, and employees recording mechanics liens seeking reimbursement: (Increase from $26 to $176)
Homeowners refinancing their mortgage: (Increase from $43 to $268)
Custodial parents recording child support liens seeking delinquent child support payments: (Increase from $13 to $88)

Then there’s Senate Bill 3, the “Veterans and Affordable Housing Bond Act of 2018.” This bill was sponsored by Marin County state senator, Mike McGuire, who claims on his Facebook page that it will “build a stronger middle class”. However, this bill potentially saddles state taxpayers with interest and repayment of a $4 billion bond.




Together, Senate Bills 2 and 3 are estimated to raise $3.9 billion annually to assist developers in building more housing (which only includes 10% affordable units). According to a non-partisan group, the state would actually need $15 billion annually to truly address the housing crisis and even that calculation is questionable.

The Suburban Middle Class Is Now Set Up To Bankroll Silicon Valley’s Growth Boom

What is really happening is that:
Silicon Valley has been on an unrestrained growth binge;
Thousands of jobs have been added without a commensurate increase in housing or any significant increase in income to the vast majority of existing residents;
Under the guise of altruistic ideology and the new doctrine of regionalism, YIMBYs have teamed up with state legislators - eager for campaign contributions from big developers - to force middle class suburban taxpayers to foot the bill for Silicon Valley’s continued growth boom; and
With the passage of the housing bill package of SB 2, SB3 and SB35, YIMBYs have now unofficially declared war on suburbia, forcing suburban jurisdictions to pay for, plan for and accept urban style growth in “My Back Yard” or suffer legal and financial consequences.

70 Acres in Chicago- What happened when low income housing was replaced with mixed income.

A Requiem for Chicago's Cabrini Green Housing Projects

“70 Acres in Chicago” chronicles what happened when the city tore down the Cabrini Green projects to replace them with mixed-income housing.

BRENTIN MOCK


Hellen Shiller


Ronit Bezalel has spent 20 years filming the brick-by-brick dismantling of the Cabrini Green public housing projects in Chicago for her recently released documentary 70 Acres in Chicago. The dwellings figure prominently—and sometimes notoriously—in the American imagination, largely through its portrayal in TV shows like “Good Times” and movies like Candyman and Cooley High. They were built in the early 1940s in an area near downtown Chicago that had been a neighborhood mostly composed of Italian families. By the 1960s, it had become a predominantly black community, with nearly 15,000 families living in Cabrini’s mostly high-rise apartment buildings.

The city decided to replace Cabrini Green with mixed-income housing under the federal Hope VI program in the early 1990s. Bezalel began documenting Cabrini’s destruction in 1995, the year the first buildings were torn down. Much of her 55-minute documentary focuses on what has happened to the families displaced for this mixed-income experiment. The film also documents the ways in which Cabrini families spoke out and fought against the city’s plans to tear down their homes.

In one scene, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley is seen speaking at a 1997 press conference, where he promises that “every family that wants to stay in this community will stay in this community.” It’s a familiar refrain for urban renewal compacts, and one that turned out to be dead wrong in Chicago. Mark Pratt, a main character in Bezalel’s film, was a Cabrini resident at the time of Daley’s conference. But 20 years later, with all 70 acres of the housing projects now officially wiped away and replaced with new rowhouses, Pratt was not able to return to live to the community.
Former Cabrini Green resident Mark Pratt at the Cabrini rowhouses (Photo: Cristina Rutter)

Bezalel spoke to CityLab about her documentary and what she learned about Chicago, racism, and displacement over the film’s 20-year production process.

Whenever there’s a discussion about displacement, there’s usually an underlying issue of racial segregation. Was it difficult reconciling the legacy of segregation with the desires of black families to remain in a segregated environment?

It isn't difficult to reconcile these two issues, because I don’t think they're different. Segregation in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing. People self-segregate. We seek comfort in the familiar. I think it's more about whether a community has the agency to decide where and how they shall live. It's about who has the right to the city.

Historically, African-American families in Chicago were not granted the agency to move where they wanted. Their mobility was threatened by economic, legal, and event violent means. You had redlining and restrictive covenants. Firebombs were thrown in people’s windows. Segregation was shaped by the powers that be, arising from white privilege and a lack of respect for people of color.

Fast forward to the late 1990s and early 2000s, when Cabrini started being demolished, and residents fought to stay in their community. This was about coming together in unity, strength, and with agency. Perhaps one can view this as segregation as a conscious choice, which is quite different than segregation that is forced upon a community.

What do you think about urban design and planning theories that characterize high-rise buildings themselves as dysfunctional?

I don't think there is anything inherently dysfunctional about high-rises. If there was a flaw in [these] high-rises, it was an economic flaw. High-rises are quite expensive to maintain. In Cabrini, you had an elevator that frequently broke down and was expensive to fix. This, coupled with the financial mismanagement of the Chicago Housing Authority, led to a situation where the high-rises were run down, which became a problem.

I recognize that there are different schools of thought on this. There’s a school that says the high rise is just bad. Bradford Hunt, in his book Blueprint for Disaster writes about how the high-rises were shoddily made. So you have that argument. And then also there’s the argument that it’s not the high-rises at all. I feel that the conditions of the high-rises were pretty bad, but I don’t feel it was necessarily the design, per se. I think it was just general neglect overall. I don’t feel that if we all had low-rises—which is what is being built there now—it would cure the problems. What’s interesting is that some of the new homes being built there now are high-rises. Parkside, which is on Cabrini Green land, is a high-rise.

We look at design to escape whats going on underneath, the inequalities underneath. And that becomes used as a veil or a shield.

What do you think of the Moving to Opportunity research and recent court decisions concerning moving poor families to wealthier neighborhoods?

What I can say is that there needs to be more dialogue about race and class issues when we move poor families to wealthier neighborhoods. There need to be forums where we can come together in a safe way to discuss the issues. Simply displacing people and hoping for the best doesn't work.

Developer Peter and Jackie Holsten are doing this at the Parkside of Old Town mixed-income community. Parkside is the mixed-income community built on Cabrini land. So, the Holstens brought in a performance company called The Kaleidoscope Group. Former Cabrini residents, renters and home owners wrote about incidences in the community that happened to them. This group then acted it out, in a way that made it safe and not pointing fingers at anyone, and then there was a dialogue. This is healing, this is addressing issues of race and class. Just plopping people down beside each other and hoping for the best doesn't work without this social lubricant.

People ask me why I made this film, and what my interest in race and class is. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. When I was a kid in the ‘70s, we were bused to a black school in Wilmington, Delaware. And so, we’re these white kids plopped into a black school where there was no discussion of race in the curriculum. It was just, ‘Here you are now. Now you’re going to get along and be friends and everything is going to be wonderful.’ Meanwhile, some of the white teachers were spreading racist behaviors, and some of the black students had to deal with their community being invaded and fractured.

Were there any ideas you had going into the film that you shifted perspective on during the filmmaking process?

I went into the film with a clear agenda that tearing down homes was bad. I still feel that way, but I evolved as a person and filmmaker to see the shades of grey. It is complicated. Was it really horrific? Sure. Was it wonderful? Yeah. Should they tear down the buildings? No. I think I got a lot more real and willing to engage with the issues on a more serious level, to the point that I realized I don’t have the answers. I’m certainly not a developer, designer, or any of that. I’m more of just a storyteller.

Overall, what kept me at Cabrini was a sense of connection and a sense of community there. There really is an injustice in the erasure of an entire community, and not valuing that community, and that just felt wrong to me.

What should be the audience’s takeaway? That this is complicated, or that there was a real injustice here?

I don’t know if it’s either-or. My activism is through storytelling, and the takeaway would be for people who know nothing about Cabrini to have a better sense of what it was. And to preserve this, since the physical structure is gone, on video or digitally so that their stories aren’t forgotten. Also for people to connect the dots when they see the same thing happen in their community.

The Ruling Class

The Ruling Class

The ruling class decide which ideas are acceptable, which scientific theories to believe, what speech is permitted.

John Stossel | October 26, 2016




America is often described as a society without the Old World's aristocracy. Yet we still have people who feel entitled to boss the rest of us around. The "elite" media, the political class, Hollywood and university professors think their opinions are obviously correct, so they must educate us peasants.

OK, so they don't call us "peasants" anymore. Now we are "deplorables"—conservatives or libertarians. Or Trump supporters.

The elite have a lot of influence over how we see things.


I don't like Donald Trump. I used to. I once found him refreshing and honest. Now I think he's a mean bully. I think that partly because he mocked a disabled person. I saw it on TV. He waved his arms around to mimic a New York Times reporter with a disability—but wait!

It turns out that Trump used the same gestures and tone of speech to mock Ted Cruz and a general he didn't like. It's not nice, but it doesn't appear directed at a disability.

I only discovered this when researching the media elite. Even though I'm a media junkie, I hadn't seen the other side of the story. The elite spoon-fed me their version of events.

Another reason I don't like Trump is that he supported the Iraq war—and then lied about that. Media pooh-bahs told me Trump pushed for the war years ago on The Howard Stern Show.

But then I listened to what Trump actually said.

"Are you for invading Iraq?" Stern asked.

Trump replied, "Yeah, I guess ... so." Later, on Neil Cavuto's show, Trump said, "Perhaps (Bush) shouldn't be doing it yet, and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations." I wouldn't call that "support"—the way NBC's debate moderator and many others have.

I was stunned by how thoroughly the media have distorted Trump's position. That's a privilege you get when you're part of the media elite: You get to steer the masses' thinking.

At the second debate, we all know that Trump walked over to Hillary Clinton's podium, as if he was "stalking Ms. Clinton like prey," said The New York Times. CNN said, "Trump looms behind Hillary Clinton at the debate."

Afterward, Clinton went on Ellen DeGeneres' show and said Trump would "literally stalk me around the stage, and I would just feel this presence behind me. I thought, 'Whoa, this is really weird.'"

But it was a lie. Watch the video. Clinton walked over to Trump's podium. Did the mainstream media tell you that? No.

The ruling class has its themes, and it sticks to them.

When Clinton wore white to a debate, the Times called the color an "emblem of hope" and a Philadelphia Inquirer writer used words like "soft and strong ... a dream come true." But when Melania Trump wore white, that same writer called it a "scary statement," as if Melania Trump's white symbolized white supremacy, "another reminder that in the G.O.P. white is always right."

Give me a break.

The ruling class decide which ideas are acceptable, which scientific theories to believe, what speech is permitted.

In the book Primetime Propaganda, Ben Shapiro writes that the Hollywood ruling class calls conservatives "moral scum."

He says, "If you're entering the industry, you have to keep (your beliefs) under wraps because nobody will hire you ... they just assume you're a bad person."

They won't tell you why you weren't hired. They just tell you, "You weren't right for the part," explains Shapiro. "Talent is subjective, which means that it's pretty easy to find an excuse not to call back the guy who voted for George W. Bush."

Years ago, the ruling class was the Church. Priests said the universe revolved around Earth. Galileo was arrested because he disagreed.

Today, college lefties, mainstream media, Hollywood and the Washington establishment have replaced the Church, but they are closed-minded dogmatists, too.

We are lucky that now we have a lot of information at our fingertips. We don't need to rely on the ruling class telling us what to believe. We can make up our own minds.